How My Grandfather Saw the World
TOWARD THE END, MY GRANDFATHER TOLD US ABOUT THE time he was sailing on a United States Navy battleship in the Mediterranean Sea and his convoy was attacked by the German Luftwaffe. In the cacophony and chaos, he watched a gunner on another American battleship in the party turn the great deck guns and shoot a Nazi warplane out of the sky. It spun from the air and crashed into the water not far from my grandfather’s own ship. He told us all this, and then he told us what he thought while he watched it happen.
“That poor bastard.”
This was no surprise to hear from John Shevlin (Jack to those who knew him, Poppy to my family), whose humility and relentless curiosity about the world would never have allowed him to settle for the easy explanation: that the guy in the plane was a Nazi and that was that. It can also be harder to see these things
